


conduits

by JadeClover



Series: star-hewn colossi [16]
Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: F/M, Magic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-10
Updated: 2017-07-10
Packaged: 2018-11-30 12:04:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,335
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11463216
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JadeClover/pseuds/JadeClover
Summary: In the tired wake of a magical experiment, Haggar and her emperor muse on what they have just accomplished.





	conduits

**Author's Note:**

> I was doing a lot of thinking on just how Zarkon was able to find the Black Lion. It seemed very similar to Haggar finding the Blue Lion, which was clearly done via magic, so wouldn't that mean Zarkon was doing magic too? Some sort of artificial, assisted magic, but magic nonetheless? This is the result of those musings, an idea on how that concept came about and the mechanics behind it. (Also Haggar quietly having emotions about it in the background.)

It is early morning when they emerge from the chamber.  
  
In the hallway outside, her lord stumbles, bracing himself with a hand against the wall, a pained noise slipping out between his teeth. She draws alongside him and pauses, tilts her head up but does not speak. What is there to be said? It is futile to ask after his pain—she already knows it, knows it intimately. After a session like this, her every nerve has been burned raw, the shields around her mind stripped bare. Without meaning to, she reads the shades of his pain in his quintessence—and after such a feat, his quintessence is a blinding, unstable thing, almost painful to behold.  
  
But the experiment was a success.  
  
( _What is there to be said—what_ can _she say? That in some strange, quiet, soaring way, she is proud of him? She cannot say that._ )  
  
She walks on, and after a beat, he follows. Behind them, the pinprick presences of her druids are trailing away; after this, they are too worn even to teleport. Evidence of their lesser power reserves—( _and this set was only present for the latter half of the test_ ).  
  
She lets their presences fade into darkness and walks forward into much of the same. These halls are old, forgotten, even by her. She cannot quite remember what labs were once contained here. No doubt they will be exhumed in the following centuries for projects she cannot yet dream of, but at present, they have fallen into disuse and disrepair, and the shadows cling a little too thickly on the walls.  
  
She does not know where she is going.  
  
As if that realization is enough to jar her, she stops. The heavier footfalls of her lord halt behind her—( _and all this time, has he simply been letting her lead him into nothing?_ )  
  
_This cannot stand,_ thinks the part of her mind that is still decisive but too tired to know what it ought to be decisive about.  
  
(More like _she_ cannot stand _, whispers the wry part, which she thought would have succumbed to exhaustion vargas ago._ )  
  
Veering to the side, in the nook between two protruding columns, she puts her back against the wall and sinks down. Any other time, she would refuse this, the indignity of it, but she is too exhausted to care and they are far too clearly alone for her to worry about decorum.  
  
There is the sound of shifting armor as her lord moves to join her.  
  
It is surreal, in a way. The Emperor and the Witch, sunk to the floor from exhaustion in a lonely, darkened hallway. Absurd, if she thinks on it. ( _She does not._ )  
  
Her hands are aching now, too painful to ignore, as at last the sheer amount of energy channeled through them takes its toll. She folds them and tucks them beneath her chin, and even though the ache extends into her wrists, her arms, her shoulders... _everywhere,_ truly—it helps.  
  
She measures her power reserves in terms of how long until she must rest to recharge them, and her internal clock has now flipped into the negatives, informing her she should have slept quintants ago. Perhaps she has overdone it. Perhaps her lord has, too, at her urging, and there is a stirring of guilt at that but she cannot bring herself to regret it.  
  
"The experiment was a success," she says.  
  
In the kind of sense that is not strictly _sensory_ —( _as when she has pushed herself this far, she can detect many things she should not_ )—she feels rather than sees or hears him tilt his head back against the wall. "Yes."  
  
Even he recognizes this success. This is more than she could have hoped for. She was prepared to emerge from the test with readings bearing study and a handful of methods to refine but no kind of clear and obvious effects. Except, they kept pushing, both of them, and the results have become unmistakable.  
  
Her emperor has performed magic.  
  
( _Pride. Burning, honest pride._ )  
  
She had not thought it possible mere centuries ago when she first considered the idea. One cannot simply be given the gift of magic by providing them with an excess of quintessence to use—it must be their own natural reserves from which the power springs. But later, she discovered this: Millennia of infusing her emperor with a specific refined quintessence blend has had the effect of shifting his own patterns into almost exact alignment...  
  
And the result? At her prompting, after hours of learning to tame the power he was provided, the potential he never knew he had, he has produced effect. A small manipulation only, brief and uncontrolled, but it cannot be denied.  
  
The experiment was a success.  
  
"What was it like?" she asks. To do magic after so long of it being impossibility. She can scarcely recall her own first steps in the art, and though small, stumbling steps may be all he will ever accomplish ( _as limitations do remain_ ), it is still a beginning.  
  
He does not answer at first, and she tilts her head in his direction. "...Sire?"  
  
"I cannot describe the sensation." The weight of contemplation is heavy in his words. Clearly, it bothers him that he cannot so easily quantify the feeling. "It is almost like..."  
  
_Oh._  
  
"Like you were a conduit?"  
  
He blinks, turns and meets her gaze. "...Yes. Exactly."  
  
"That is what you were. When one performs magic, one's body becomes the conduit and the transducer between raw power and its measurable effect." The pain in her hands sharpens at the reminder; she tucks them closer. "It is a singular feeling, is it not?"  
  
"Yes. Singular..." The word does not quite fit in his mind. Perhaps he would like to say _strange_ instead. It is that as well.  
  
"I have every confidence your ability can be refined, with time. It is simply a matter of determining the right methods and gaining experience. There will always be limitations—not least of them the need for constant energy supplement—but there are also _possibilities_. Siphoning, kinesis, scrying. All will be theoretically feasible in the future." The ideas of just _how_ to make them so begin to pull at her mind, silencing her as she weighs them back and forth.  
  
"You are thinking too much," he tells her, and rightly so.  
  
A small sigh. "Perhaps I am." Is it not enough to simply revel in their success? There will be time for more later, when they are both not so tired.  
  
She leans forward, curls in on herself, her hair falling over her knees. Blessedly, her mind has gone quiet, but there is one thing that still lingers: _Conduits_.  
  
"You found the feeling to be strange... but was it also gratifying?"  
  
"After that great effort? _Yes._ "  
  
"Merely relief after frustration?"  
  
The barest of pauses. Spoken thoughtfully, almost: "It was as though a new dimension of possibility had been born into existence."  
  
Unseen, her lips turn up a fraction. "It had. You will learn to master it, given time." There is a part of her that yearns to teach him that control, that easy familiarity. Magic has always been such a close and personal thing to her.  
  
( _She thinks: I am proud of you._ )  
  
"Later," he says, and shifts to stretch his legs in front of him. "Another day."  
  
"Yes." _Of course._  
  
She leans her folded arms on her knees and closes her eyes, blocking out the sight of dulled paneling and failing light fixtures. Now that she is not so focused on vision, an awareness of quintessence floods her mind; it is present everywhere in the power lines around her, but nothing is brighter than the miniature sun at her side. She is too tired to build her shields against it. Instead, she simply relaxes, gives in to exhaustion, and lets her lord's brightness drown out all else.  
  
"Another day," she agrees.  
  
And then, for a long while, they simply sit in silence.

**Author's Note:**

> You know the drill, I've got a tumblr [@jade-clover](jade-clover.tumblr.com), come talk to me about stuff, bear witness to my occasional ramblings about writing...


End file.
